Better than Ganymede

Tom Paulin

Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica Jones was an able lecturer, but she never published anything and so was never promoted, although she stayed at Leicester until she retired in 1981. They soon took up together, although Larkin had, and would continue to have, other entanglements. Until late in their long and difficult relationship, the pair lived apart, though they shared holidays. Monica eventually moved into Larkin’s house in Hull in 1983, where he looked after her (she was an alcoholic) until his death in December 1985. She hardly left the house after this – according to Anthony Thwaite, who edited this collection – and died in February 2001.

These letters are very different from those collected in the Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-85. Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck by the marked self-consciousness of his witty manner, which resembled that of a knight of the theatre). The ones here are far less eloquent. Only a few of them were written before Larkin moved to Belfast in the autumn of 1950, to become a librarian at Queen’s University. His first letter from there begins ecstatically – ‘The evening star rises in front of my window!’ – but moves glumly on to describe Belfast as a ‘wide and cobble-streeted town, lined with frowning buildings in the late Victorian manner & some indifferent shops’. He says he’s already fed up with ‘the Irish male face (craggy, drink-flushed, with greasy black curls & a too-tight collar) & the Irish female face (plump, bad-teethed, pinkly powdered, with a diamanté lizard on the lapel)’. But the five years he spent in Belfast inspired more poems than any other period of his life. In ‘The Importance of Elsewhere’ he writes that ‘the salt rebuff of speech,/ Insisting so on difference, made me welcome.’ He delighted in

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faintArchaic smell of dockland, like a stable,The herring-hawker’s cry, dwindling, wentTo prove me separate, not unworkable.

Here he relishes the Ulster accent, catching the tang of Belfast Lough and the smell of the harbour quays. When I arrived in Belfast in December 1953 the dry, dusty smell of the wooden quays reminded me of stables, too.

There aren’t many descriptive passages in these letters, but those there are often have some connection with the natural world. ‘I know you don’t like birds,’ he writes in June 1953, ‘but the cool shapely twitterings that rise before daybreak remind me of the dewy tents of leaves they are hidden among, the flowers folded in the darkness, the beady eyes glancing about – “sleep all night with open eye” – and the sense of running into a new day, adventurous and triumphant.’ The quotation is from The Canterbury Tales. Immediately he adds: ‘I hope these purple passages don’t embarrass you.’ A couple of years later he writes:

Near home I stopped and watched half a dozen Jersey cows. How lovely they are! like Siamese cats, almost: the patches of white round the eyes and the soft way the coffee-colour melts into the white underbody. They were licking each other affectionately in pairs, on the chest and along the neck. When one stopped the other would begin licking back! The Peaceable Kingdom!

That unexpected, beautiful comparison to Siamese cats could be the beginning of a poem, as the reference to Edward Hicks’s famous primitive painting suggests, but it didn’t happen. He says – it’s 1955 – that his ‘head is full of ideas for poems, these days, but they vanish as soon as I sit down’.

He often asks Monica’s views on his poems and her comments are acute. In a letter from 1954, Larkin says that she has put her ‘paw’ on the ‘flaw in “Church Going”, a lack of strong continuity – it is dangerously like chat, 4th leader stuff’. Larkin is worried that

the most important emotion – the church as a place where people came to be serious, were always serious, & all their different forms of seriousness came to be intermingled, so that a christening reminded of a funeral & a funeral of a wedding: nowadays these things happen in different buildings & the marvellous ‘blent air’ of a church is growing rarer – this emotion I feel does not come out nearly strongly enough. However, I don’t know what can be done about it now.

The word ‘blent’, a slightly archaic form of ‘blended’, fits the high tone of the poem. Larkin is obviously hurt in his next letter when he tells Monica that Kingsley Amis wasn’t interested in the poem, though he was ‘quite polite’ about it (he didn’t like the use of ‘blent’).

In a letter written after hearing ‘Mr Bleaney’, with its complaints about rented rooms (‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook/Behind the door, no room for books or bags –/“I’ll take it.”’), on the radio in 1955, Monica tells him it

Letters

Tom Paulin writes that Larkin continued to use Yeatsian compound adjectives despite his rejection of Yeats in favour of Hardy (LRB, 21 October). He may also have borrowed ‘blent’ from Yeats. The second verse of ‘Among School Children’ has ‘it seemed that our two natures blent/Into a sphere from youthful sympathy.’

Tom Paulin suggests that Larkin’s well documented antipathy to marriage is qualified by ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (LRB, 21 October). The last lines of that poem are: ‘A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/ Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.’ The sense of falling communicates the ‘disappointment’, but Paulin identifies in the arrows/rain metaphor ‘a swelling sense of fertility and alert purpose, with more than a hint of tears’. Is this more positive construction justified? I read it differently, as a failure of aims: the guided impetus of the wedding moments, launching the happy couples, loses direction and purpose, becomes diaspora, and slowly disappears. It is surely a reading that is more consistent with the poem’s general tenor as well as Larkin’s broader prejudices.

Malcolm Andrews
University of Kent

Larkin got ‘blent’ from Yeats (Letters, 4 November)? Anyone of Larkin’s years, let alone Yeats’s, would have been familiar with the section of Childe Harold beginning with the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball (‘There was a sound of revelry by night’) and ending on the field of Waterloo: ‘heap’d and pent,/Rider and horse, – friend, foe, – in one red burial blent!’ Byron got it from speaking English. You could set up a Pedants Corner, like Private Eye.

The reason Malcolm Andrews objects to Tom Paulin’s positive reading of the end of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ is that he takes into account only the final two lines of the poem (Letters, 18 November). Like Paulin I have always found the intensely moving last line indicative of ‘a swelling sense of fertility and alert purpose’ (even if I couldn’t have put it so well) and this response is surely conditioned by earlier lines in the final stanza. Larkin has expressed his wonder and his irritation at the farcical aspects of weddings – the ‘nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes’, the ‘uncle shouting smut’ – but once he has got them off his chest, as so often in his long major poems, he turns, with a marked change of tone, to the serious: ‘and it was nearly done, this frail/Travelling coincidence; and what it held/Stood ready to be loosed with all the power/That being changed can give.’ This long sentence, flowing purposefully forward in enjambed lines, culminates in the significant notion of ‘all the power that being changed can give’, signalling a solemnity we also find at the end of ‘Church Going’, ‘Dockery and Son’ or ‘The Old Fools’.

The ‘arrow-shower’ of married couples in Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (‘Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain’) comes as a bit of a feudal surprise in that poem, but does feel at home next to ‘An Arundel Tomb’, which closes the collection and describes the portrayal of love on the sepulchre of a medieval earl and countess. In these poems love and marriage are hidden over horizons of space and time, not from everyone but certainly from the poet. Malcolm Andrews’s idea that the ‘arrow shower’ represents a ‘failure of aims’ – ‘the guided impetus of the wedding moments, launching the happy couples, loses direction and purpose, becomes diaspora, and slowly disappears’ – seems wide of the mark (Letters, 18 November). Arrows don’t lose much direction and purpose in flight, and they don’t slowly disappear. Cupid’s missiles may have struck: the point is that Larkin can’t see whether they have or not; it is the couples who are being ‘loosed with all the power/ That being changed can give.’